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Why would this be useful? If you wanted to come back and look up your quotes, or buy anything else from us, you'd find all your details still here, so you wouldn't have to answer all the questions again - a bit of a result

Jane Jenkins and her partner Steve contacted moneysupermarket.com for a makeover as they try to sort out their finances and prepare for their lives together.

The couple are finding that their finances are being stretched to the limit and are particularly worried about their overdrafts.

She works as an office manager, while he is a tree surgeon. They moved into their three-bedroom house in September 2007 and soon found it was more expensive than they thought.

Jane explains: “We quickly noticed a difference in living costs and how much more commitment and cost our home needed. The first few months saw us both doing as much overtime as we could so that we could still enjoy ourselves as well as maintaining our home.

“Unfortunately the extra hours I was putting in at work took their toll and eventually I was off work for a month.”

Being signed off work for a month meant that Jane and Steve had to tighten the purse strings, as her sick pay wasn’t enough to contribute her share of the bills. Once she recovered and went back to work, disaster struck again and she was made redundant.

Jane fortunately has a new job she really enjoys, with a decent salary, and they both want to start paying off their dreaded overdrafts and being saving for their future.

Using the comparison tools available on moneysupermarket.com we have managed to gain them a potential annual saving of just under £1,300 – read on to find out how.

The couple are particularly worried about the rates they are being charged on their overdrafts. They hold a total of three current accounts with HSBC – one each for their personal spends and a joint account from where their bills are paid from.

Their overdraft balances combined come to just over £1,960. With each account charging 19.90% on negative balances, they are both paying through the nose in interest.

Alliance & Leicester’s Premier Direct Current Account currently offers 0% on overdrafts for 12 months, so if Jane and Steve moved all of their accounts over they would potentially save a massive £390 in interest putting them in a much stronger position to get their debt cleared.

The household’s current policy is with Countrywide Insurance Services and, despite a no-claims discount of two years, their premium still sits at nearly £345.

A quick search on our home insurance channel has shown that if the policy was moved over to Kwik-Fit Insurance they would cut their annual premium by more than half and pay just £111 - giving an impressive saving of £230.

Although their money is stretched, Jane and Steve do still try to put money away when they can, and have just under £300 in an easy access account with Nationwide Building Society – which pays them just 0.20%.

They could easily find a better rate – ING Direct has an account paying a base-rate busting 3.20% for the first year – but now may not be the best time for them to save. If they ploughed all their free cash into their overdrafts and paid them off before the interest-free period runs out, then they would soon be in a stronger position to save much more cash.